Xhenet Aliu: On Being a First Person Girly at Heart, Obsessions with Sentence Cadence, Writing Working Class Characters, and Her Latest Novel ‘Everybody Says It’s Everything’

I was first introduced to Xhenet Aliu’s work through her debut novel, Brass. In a frustrating place within my own novel work, Xhenet’s book found me at the right time. I started calling it my “guiding star” book because it truly unlocked something in my writerly brain that allowed me to learn what kind of writer I was. I wasn’t aware I needed permission to write the kind of sentences I wanted to until I got that permission from this book. Xhenet is not only a gifted storyteller, but her prose crackles with life. Humor, depth, and poetry. Her work stopped me in my tracks, reminding me that my writing can be anything I want it to be. There is nothing I need to adhere to except for my own obsessions and desires. I have since been a Xhenet super fan and was thrilled to learn of her second novel. 

Everybody Says It’s Everything (Random House, 2025) follows adopted twins Drita and Petrit (aka Pete), who have drifted apart as they reach adulthood. Drita hasn’t heard from Pete in three years when his girlfriend and their son unexpectedly show up without him and in need of help. Thus begins an unraveling of their Albanian roots, sibling bonds, the war in Kosovo, and what it means to be family. 

In our conversation, Xhenet discusses the joys and challenges of crafting a novel, from finding the right perspective to letting characters surprise her. We also talk about her obsession with the musicality of sentences, how writing in third person felt like stepping into unfamiliar territory, and books that helped her during the process of writing Everybody Says It’s Everything. 

Kailey Brennan DelloRusso: How are you feeling now that your second book is making its way into the world?

Xhenet Aliu: I keep thinking, Am I broken? Or am I better than I used to be in the head? Because before my last book came out, I just remember being a complete wreck—like a nervous, anxious wreck. And I’m not. The world has changed, I have gotten older. I feel pretty zen about things where I’m like, You know, this is a really privileged position to be in. Everything that happens from here on out is kind of icing. So I’m just kind of trying to celebrate the little moments along the way instead of freaking out about all the different ways I might mess something up. So, I feel pretty good. But there’s a part of me that’s still neurotic, that’s thinking, Is panicky Xhenet just around the corner waiting for me? That’s going to take all these good vibes that I’m feeling and turn them on me. [Laughs]

KBD: I think that’s a good place to be. I know the process is always different from book to book, but I’m curious: when writing your second novel, did you notice anything about your writing process that changed?

XA: Everything. I should say that my first book was a short story collection. And, like many writers, I started off with short stories. And when you get an MFA, that’s the form that I think most people naturally take to because the workshop format just works best when you have these self-contained little pieces.

So when I started writing Brass, I was kind of writing the way that I wrote short stories, which is like, Hey, I have a character idea. Let me just start writing things down. And I very much fell in love with the character of Elsie, who was the primary character. The daughter, Luljeta, didn’t yet exist in the earliest stages.

That book took me a really long time to write because I was winging it along the way. I probably had a thousand pages of character study, but not really a story. I had to learn how to structure a bigger arc. And I learned that very much the hard way, by drafting and redrafting and redrafting and sharing with people and getting feedback.

Finally, at some point, I had to swallow my pride and actually work out an outline to make sure that it wasn’t just kind of like an on-ramp for a thousand miles. 

So when I started this book, I was like, Okay, I know that I need some structure, some parameters in place to keep me on track. I started with a very loose outline. When I say loose outline, I mean I might have had twenty chapters plotted out with basically a sentence summary saying, This is what has to happen by this chapter. I felt like any more granular than that, and I would feel like I was filling in a Mad Libs. And it wouldn’t feel very creative or satisfying. But I knew that I needed those guardrails in place to keep me adhering to the story.

And that being said, the story changed over time, too. So I just had to keep moving the guardrails as I found these new directions. But I think the entire thing was more structured deliberately from the beginning.

Part of that also is because this is a more researched book, so there were factual and historical occurrences that provided some boundaries for me too. It was a very, very different experience.

KBD: How long did this second novel take you?

XA: Time is a construct that I don’t understand. [Laughs] I think I started the very, very first inklings of it a while back. I think even before Brass came out. 

But it really was over the course of two summers that it mostly came together.

And they were Covid summers, so we were all kind of home. Speaking of privilege, I don’t have kids, so I wasn’t home being a full-time babysitter or mother. I basically had a residency at home for a couple of summers because I teach, and I wasn’t working over the summer. That’s where the bulk of the writing got done. A much, much more compressed timeline than Brass. Also, I wasn’t teaching when I wrote Brass, so I was writing a little bit before work pretty much every day.

KBD: I know everyone’s process is different. Some people like to touch the work every day, and then some people like to just have what you said—a controlled time to just kind of be immersed in it. I’m finding that when I started my novel, I needed to do it every day. And now, where I’m at in the revision process, I’d rather have one day in the week where I can spend a couple of hours on it than every day. What kind of writer are you?

XA: It’s changed based on life events, and that’s something I talk to my students about a lot, too. I want to say, I’m this kind of writer, but sometimes life doesn’t let you be that kind of writer, and you just have to adapt. So, when working a nine-to-five, I found that it was super important to just get up and dedicate an hour to it before work when my brain was still fresh. Because if I got home from all day of work looking at a computer, the last thing I wanted to do was come home and turn on a computer and look at more. So my writing process was about an hour every day, which is not a ton of time, but if you do that five days a week, it’s like a little part-time job. Over the course of a year, you get a lot of words. I didn’t have really much of a choice in how I approached writing at that point, but it worked.

Now that I’m teaching, I find it’s really difficult for me to dedicate an hour every day, because every day looks different. My schedule’s bouncing all over the place. I have summers off, so now that’s where I’m doing most of my work. It’s really just adapting to what the life circumstances are.

KBD: I think that’s so important. I feel like a lot of us, especially when you’re just starting out, you read so much literature about how other writers approach what you want to do, and then you kind of feel like, I can't do that, or that doesn't work for me. But I really think what you just said is so true. It’s really just adapting to your life. It’s going to keep changing, and also, your approach to the work is going to keep changing the more you write.

XA: A hundred percent. And I think when you’re generating a first draft, the most important thing is just getting words down on the page. You can do that in an hour. You can get 500 words, 800 words in an hour. But then when you’re revising, you do need to take a more macro view, and that is probably going to require a bigger chunk of time.

KBD: I’m obsessed with how you create sentences. They’re so evocative and specific and oftentimes funny. Brass is a “guiding star” novel for me. I read it twice while I was writing my own novel, and then I would just have it on my desk and pick it up and read random spots when I needed inspiration. 

XA: I love that. That makes me feel really good. Thank you.

KBD: I just love it so much. I’ve talked about it so many times. [Laughs] I know it’s hard to break down your own process, but I would love to know your approach to revisions. Are you really meticulous about sentences? Or are you more focused on the story as a whole first?

XA: I am really obsessed with the sound of sentences. And this is not saying anything novel, but I have to read everything out loud. I don’t do that when I’m drafting, but I do when I’m revising. Our eyes and our brains are in cahoots. When I’m looking at something on a screen, my brain is saying, Yeah, that’s fine, because it knows what it wants to see. But when I hear myself say it out loud, my ears are like, Oh, that sounds funny, or that doesn’t have a rhythm or flow. Just paying attention to the musicality reinforces me to look at it through a different lens again.

I mean, it’s exhausting. My throat starts to hurt after a while, but I do really have to read the entire thing—over and over again—out loud. 

In terms of where the language came from with Brass, especially the first-person sections with Elsie—when I first started writing, I really tried to make everything so pretty.

Because everything I read that I loved just seemed so pretty. And I was like, Why can’t I make pretty things the way that other people seem to make pretty things?

Eventually, I realized I was just trying to emulate the pretty writers I admired on a language level, which is a completely valid way to begin as a writer.

But it felt so empty.

At some point, I was in my MFA program, going through a personal crisis, and I thought, You know what? They’re probably going to kick me out anyway. I’m just going to write this story the way I want to write it. I used a language that was less obsessed with feigning emotion and just focused on being raw about it. That was the first story I wrote that I think turned out to be successful. It was because I had accepted that there was a way to use language that wasn’t just deliberately polished and sculpted to please what I perceived as a literary reader. Instead, I started thinking about the people I grew up with—people who used language that was rougher, who weren’t college-educated, who weren’t always native English speakers. But the depth and range of their emotions were just as robust as any college professor I had ever sat in a classroom with. So I started asking myself, How can I make that broad expression of humanity clear on the page while still respecting the language of the characters—who wouldn’t necessarily use a highly elevated syntax? That was really my red-light moment where I thought, Oh, I think I’m onto something here.

Then I started reading writers like Roddy Doyle. I don’t know if you’ve ever read him.

KBD: No.

XA: He’s Irish. I think you would love him. I know we just met [laughs], but your attraction to a certain kind of language—it seems like you’d love his work. He was a huge influence on me because he writes using a working-class Dublin vernacular.

I’ve never been to Ireland. I’m not Irish. But the language in his work felt so true and authentic to the characters, and it was still so musical. The storytelling was so subtle, and a lot of the meaning was in the subtext. These weren’t people who were trained to clearly articulate what they were feeling, but it was getting across anyway. And I just love that so much. I was like, I want to be the American version of that.

KBD: I love that. And it’s so interesting because I feel like one of the reasons I loved Brass so much is because, at the time, I felt like it was giving me permission to not fixate so much on certain types of sentences, like you were saying. Not that I would ever say your writing isn’t pretty, but there’s a certain type of really literary writer that I think so many of us love. We love to read it, we love that kind of writing. But I was feeling frustrated—like, I don’t think I’m this. I’m trying here, but I don’t know if I’m this. I really do feel like one of the things that drew me toward Brass and why I loved it so much was because I realized, I can have fun with these sentences. I don’t need to make them a specific way. You gave me permission to just have fun with them.

My characters are also working class, which is interesting too. 

XA: Absolutely. And the working-class people you grew up with—you know that they’re intellectually sophisticated. They use a different kind of language to express it, right? So, if you thought that wasn’t an authentic way to write because you hadn’t seen it represented, that’s exactly why it should be represented. We can’t all just be, you know, Proust here. [Laughs] And I just think it’s more respectful and more interesting and fun to give yourself the challenge of, Okay, this character is sad. How is sadness going to be articulated using the language they have available to them? Instead of just saying, I felt sad and wistful, you know?

KBD: Yes. Speaking of obsessions, I feel like every book begins with a question or an image that we just obsess over. So I was curious—when writing this book, what were some of those obsessions that propelled you to write this story?

XA: That’s a good question. The backdrop of the Kosovo War was something that had been a seed in my mind for a long time. When I was growing up in Waterbury, Connecticut, there was already an Albanian population there, mostly from the sixties and seventies—my father being one of them. But in the late nineties, there was a whole new wave of Kosovar Albanians because of the war that was happening in the Balkans. I got to know some of them. Of course, I was born and raised in Connecticut, and my family was not from Kosovo in particular. But there was this immediate kind of, Oh, you’re Albanian, you’re one of us. And I was like, Wow. It was something that intrigued me because I hadn’t really grown up with that feeling of inclusion.

Also, the Kosovo War—the war in the Balkans in general—I remember that some people kind of vaguely recall seeing stuff about it in the news. But most people don’t know very much about it. It’s a very small region in the world. It’s volatile, but most people aren’t invested because the world is big, and there are things closer to them that they have their emotional lives centered around.

So I thought, That would be an interesting backdrop for a story. At the same time, it didn’t feel like my story to tell. I’m not from Kosovo. I’m not a war refugee. I didn’t survive a war. But the thing I’m always obsessed with is questions of family. I grew up with what I want to say is a complicated family, but it’s typically complicated. Step-siblings, half-siblings, and all these questions of, When I say “sister,” do I mean stepsister or half-sister? But it doesn’t really matter. I don’t define them so granularly. So I came up with the idea of these twins who are just radically different because I wanted them to each have very different ideas of family. I wanted to follow them as they try to figure out what that actually means for them.

It’s funny, because in Brass, Luljeta is this lonely only child of a single mother. And a lot of people assumed that story was largely autobiographical. There were a couple of elements that overlapped, sure. But I have never been an only child. I have an older brother, and ultimately, I grew up with five siblings in a tiny little house. I never had a moment of alone time—never mind a whole lifetime of it. So I really wanted to explore sibling relationships because they’re so complicated. I still haven’t figured them out. I had to reduce the number of siblings from five to one just to even begin to tackle it.

KBD: I just love the sibling relationship. It’s so interesting. I loved this book. I loved the relationship between them. And I love Jackie! I love the backstory with Jackie. She’s such an interesting character.

XA: Jackie was a surprise. I talked about how I had a vague, loose outline laid out. And Jackie was never intended to be a primary character. She was a recurring character, but I found myself thinking, She’s so flat and annoying. She was just this shrill, stereotypical mother character—slightly out of it, not really knowing what was going on. And I thought, I can’t abide that. Let me just do a little work in the sandbox. I started writing a backstory for Jackie just for my own knowledge, so I could apply it to the main manuscript. And in doing that sandbox work, I realized, Oh, this is actually really important to the story. It unlocked some things I didn’t know were missing from my initial outline. I started realigning and restructuring things along the way. But yeah, she became a personal favorite of mine without me even understanding that she was going to be a major character at all. Even when you have a plan, you’ll be very much surprised along the way.

KBD: That’s the best, though. I just found her backstory and everything, like, so, so rich. I love how she literally could give a shit about her husband. [Laughs] 

XA: Those scenes were so fun to write. And yeah, it’s like this would be a real drag if everything went to plan the entire time and you were just this vehicle for words to happen through. It would be so boring. So, yeah, I love stumbling into new discoveries like that. And I was like, she’s kind of badass. I didn’t know that. 

KBD: Since your first novel was in first and second person, how was it written in third person for this one? 

XA: It felt weird for a long time. I had heard and read all kinds of craft essays about how fun it is to explore things like distance third and an omniscient kind of third. I was like, That all does sound really cool, but I don’t really know how to operate when I’m that separated from a character psyche. Everything to me has to be filtered through their point of view and perspective. So writing in third person was a challenge for me. Writing in first person—not only Brass, but almost all of my short stories before that were in first person—it was almost like method acting. I would kind of take on this character. I'm figuring out improv style, what they say in this situation, how they approach these encounters.

And with the third person it was kind of like, Well, what’s the benefit of third person if not having some bit of objective perspective that’s added to that close psyche? So it was really difficult for me to figure out how much authorial input I needed to add to the close character perspective. And also how to keep it tonally consistent throughout all of the different character shifts, but still allow them to have their own voices too.

So yeah, it didn’t feel like the most natural voice choice for me, but this is a hard job and the rewards that come with it are pretty few and far between. Like you can do years and years and years of labor on something and maybe it gets published if you’re super lucky. Maybe it sits in a drawer for the rest of your life. And even if it gets published, it’s like, your neighbor has no idea that you just wrote a book. [Laughs] 

So for me to keep it fun, I keep challenging myself to try something that does make me uncomfortable and does feel different. With this book, I was like, I am writing a third person book, even though I really struggled to kind of get into that. Again, balancing the author voice with the character voice. It took a while to get in there.

KBD: As the reader, I thought you did a great job of getting really close to the characters. I always gravitate towards the first person but I didn’t feel like I wasn’t very far when I was reading this book. 

XA: Thank you. It’s maybe a stereotypical thing to say as a literary writer, but I care about character above all. Plot is kind of like a tool for character to be explored. If I’m too distant from the character, if I don’t feel like I’m really kind of merging with them in the process of writing their story, it just doesn’t feel authentic to me.

KBD: Totally. I mean, obviously, plot’s important, but characters over everything. I agree. 

XA: I still think I’m a first person girly at heart. 

KBD: Oh yes. It’s funny how you get hung up on that. Even since I was a teenager, I always loved reading first person, and now everything I write, I want to write in first person. It’s funny how you just kind of end up gravitating towards it. 

XA: Yeah. And then some people feel the exact opposite way, where writing in first person feels so clunky and strange to them. Or restrictive maybe, because you can’t really allow yourself permission to get out of that character’s head. And I could see that, but I mean, for me, that spell is what I look for in reading. And so of course, it’s what I’m chasing when I’m writing.

KBD: When you get stuck in a project, what are some things that help you get unstuck? 

XA: Well, I mentioned the sandbox before. That’s what I call my side document. When I feel stuck, bored, or just tired of a story, I’ll open a separate document and take a minor or secondary character—or even a situation that’s alluded to but not explored in the main text—and write it out. It doesn’t usually get directly applied or inserted into the manuscript, but it helps me better understand the context. That alone can get me past whatever is blocking me. I use that for shorter-term things too, like if it’s a designated writing day—I have to write today—but I can’t get past the second paragraph.

I know this sounds super corny and very banal, but I go for a walk. Even if I tell myself I’m just going to clear my head, reset, and empty things out, it always gets the gears turning again. There were all these studies when standing desks became popular, basically confirming that there’s an interaction between the physical body and the brain—when the body is engaged, the brain is too. I’ve tried standing desks. They do not work for me. I literally write in bed with my laptop on my chest. So there is some brain shutdown happening. Going for a walk is what gets things spinning again.

KBD: I mentioned Brass was a guiding star book for me. Were there any novels you were reading while writing this book or books you love to pick up during your writing life? 

XA: I feel really fortunate—there were a couple of books that were benchmarks for me, or real models, in different ways. And I got blurbs from both of those authors. Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book was one, because of the kind of Russian doll storytelling—where you think you’ve got the story figured out, and then a secret is revealed, and it takes a twist. I also love how he’s not afraid to be hilarious, even when exploring really serious and devastating issues. And then Vanessa Hua’s Forbidden City, because of how she’s able to take this enormous historical event—like the Mao Revolution in China, which globally reverberated much more than the war in Kosovo—and use real historical figures to create a personal, distinctive story that intersects with history, but it isn’t about history. I thought that was really cool. I admire those books a lot.

And then Infinite Country by Patricia Engel, which came out a few years ago. I’ve known Patricia for many years, and that book was really important to me because of how it layered a single family’s story across generations. There were stories from the old country of Colombia and of the children born in the U.S. And even within a single family, there were barriers created by that cultural divide. That was really important to me, too. And also, you know, Jason Mott’s and Patricia Engel’s books in particular—the way they rotated through different points of view. Because obviously, in Everybody Says It’s Everything, there are four distinct stories being told.

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Xhenet Aliu’s debut novel, Brass, won both the Townsend Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year First Novel Prize. Her debut fiction collection, Domesticated Wild Things, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Aliu’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Hobart, American Short Fiction, LitHub, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere, and she has received multiple scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, among other awards.